Christina Hemauer & Roman Keller «Die Unfreiheit der Elektronen»

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Christina Hemauer & Roman Keller (CH): Die Unfreiheit der Elektronen (photo: Hemauer/Keller)

Christina Hemauer | Roman Keller: Die Unfreiheit der Elektronen
Installation, performance, video, 2011

Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller again and again have, in various formats, investigated the nexuses between energy, culture, and history. In doing so, they focused on technical innovations that were visionary and politically way ahead of their time. In a video installation they brought Jimmy Carter’s early and eventually futile engagement with regard to the development of renewable energies back to mind, or they searched – within the framework of the 13th Cairo Biennale – for the remnants of the first industrial solar collector worldwide that had been in operation for a short time in 1913.
For their performative installation “Die Unfreiheit der Elektronen”, which they view as a “picture of present-day dependence on communicating electrons”, they dug deep into the history of technology. They discovered an experiment they do not know of if it actually ever was carried out. In the year 1795, the Spanish physician and inventor Don Francisco Salva Campillo introduced the concept of a telegraph consisting of 22 pairs of cable held by 22 people. Each person embodied a letter of the alphabet and called that letter out loud after having felt a power surge. One person wrote the message down. Later on, Salva Campillo is supposed to have worked with frogs’ legs and test tubes in which the current dissolved the water. By performing or maybe even premiering this experiment, Hemauer | Keller remind of the old nexus between electricity and communication, and the efforts undertaken to use electric power in communicating over long distances; and at a time, when electric power and its uses or possible applications only recently had been discovered. That the current-carrying body plays a central role in this re-enactment of incorporeal communication, may be one the ironies of history fascinating both artists.
 

link: / hemauer.ch